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As I mentioned briefly in one of my comments during class, I used to work at a Japanese elementary school.  About twice every week, the children had "moral class" and since the children I was responsible for (the children with "special needs") were not expected to do much during this time, I was often able to observe the classroom and listen to the teacher talk as if I were one of the students.  Since I had spent most of my elementary school years in Holland, I had never had the chance to be a student in a Japanese "moral class" as a real elementary school student, and I was surprised at how interesting the class actually was.  The students had a "moral text book" but instead of just lecturing from the book, the teacher often came to class with interesting stories to read or activates that made students think about moral issues and learn what was morally correct.  Or at least, what I thought of as moral.  That was what surprised me so much - I almost felt as if the teacher was teaching the students my sense of moral to the students!  It is true that I was raised by parents who are completely Japanese, so it is not entirely surprising that my sense of my morality is quite Japanese. However, for half of my life I lived outside of Japan, and I studied at an international school during most of elementary school.  Thus, I was surprised that what the students were learning in their "moral class" seemed to talk so strongly to my sense of morality.  I was also so intrigued by these classes, because while the students were learning about moral from the stories and activities, I felt as if I was learning something about myself from them.  It also made me wonder if the children in the class would really end up with a different sense of morality if they did not receive these moral classes at all.